You're a confrontational idiot and I have nothing further to say to you. I should've stopped trying when you declared that "in all studies I read correlation = causation".
Correlation is evidence... of correlation. Causation requires prospective analysis to prove. That's why we do experiments. It's that simple. Any time your perform retrospective analysis, you are subject to both confounding variables and sampling bias.
We know smoking causes cancer because we can take a large group, randomize it, THEN track the correlation between the development of cancer versus smoking.
This analysis cannot be done rigorously when you're comparing social groups, because they're divergent by the definition of your sampling criteria.
And that's only the beginning of the mountain of problems with THIS study. Just because you're too thick to understand it, and too eager to deal out accusations, doesn't make you right. It just makes you an asshole.
Wait a minute. Autism is not the result of parenting.
I never claimed it was. But it's always easier to blame someone than to realize that a random recombination of your genetics may have resulted in an autistic child.
Why do you frame this in the need to blame someone, anyway?
That's the way most people see the world. It avoids having to take responsibility.
I've never seen someone use "correlation isn't causation" who understood what that means.
And what makes you so qualified?
In general, these are repeated by others. When found valid, they are then examined for confounds. If you have a correlation and all confounds corrected, you do have a case where correlation = causation....In nearly all cases I've seen with a valid study, correlation = causation...
That's so deeply wrong, it's not even funny.
Firstly, AFAIK correlation can NEVER show causation mathematically.
Even in a perfect 2-variable system, with a correlation of 1.0, one cannot assume causality from correlation because the direction of causality cannot be deduced from the correlation.
Secondly, there are countless instances where correlation has no causative relationship at all. For a simple explanation, consider the correlation of a chair and a table being in the same room. Now consider their causative relationship.
It's easy to prove a lack of causation. Proving a causative relationship statistically beyond a reasonable doubt is extremely difficult.
There has never been a study that shows smoking causes cancer. In fact, there have been pretty much no studies done that show anything causes cancer in humans.
It's hard to even consider responding to this nonsense. Of course there hasn't been a study that shows that smoking causes cancer. Except there's been ten million studies that examine individual components of the mechanism of how smoking causes cancer which complement the PROSPECTIVE statistical studies regarding the correlation between smoking and cancer.
We don't know if asbestos causes Mesothelioma. We just have some correlations, and we know those are always wrong and done by those trying to pervert science.
I guess you were with the tobacco CEOs when they got up in front of Congress relatively recently (long after the warnings went on the packs) and stated that they do not believe that smoking is harmful? After all, it's never been proven. Just a couple correlational studies, and we know that if you find a correlation, it means there can't be a causational link. Right?
Now excuse me, I have to go smoke because a cigarette a day keeps the doctor away. Or so the tobacco industry tells us, and no study has ever proven them wrong.
You want to come up with more ad hominems, or are you done? Cause they don't impress me.
However, there are plenty of others I could come up with, which are not accounted for.
But none of this would matter, if NYTimes correlation articles weren't used by stupid politicians to try to appease their constituents with policy, or by more nefarious people to sucker others into creating even more rules and regulations.
Without the "writers" reactions - we'd have a society that quietly accepts anything
But that's the problem. We DO have a society that quietly accepts everything... everything that appeals to their basest drives, or reinforces past prejudices, with little to no application of logic or reason.
In this case, as well as when considering Anthropogenic Global Warming, Evolution, or vaccinations, the most paranoid conclusions are the most satisfying, in that they reinforce a foregone conclusion, as well as relieve the bearer of further responsibility.
Glaciers melt = not my fault, it's the sun. Child has autism = not my fault, it's the vaccines Child has problems = not my fault, it's the drug conspiracy Too stupid = fluoride in the water School shooting = gun manufacturers and video games Poor = Conspiracy of the rich
These are just a few of a myriad of memes that have been further reinforced by the advent of the Internet and the ensuing ability to find supporters of the most wildly wrong ideas.
I deeply despise these kinds of articles for the joke they make of statistical correlation.
I think they could all come with a giant "Correlation!=Causation" red box warning.
On one hand, maybe the poor kids are getting over-medicated by a government/drug company/new world order rich person conspiracy. On the other, maybe it just so happens that more of the poor tend to have psychological problems, which would explain their (and their children's) difficulties in progressing up within the society. Or the environment endured by the children of the poor would tend to be more damaging than the safe and comfortable environment that the children of the wealthy enjoy.
Without much more data, and without very careful prospective analysis, these "correlation" articles are little more than curiously interesting FUD.
However, since they tend to be part of the outrage machine, I think we ought to hold the writers personally responsible for the reactions that ensue.
It's one thing to regrow an axon in a petri dish. It's something else to regrow a 1m long axon inside a fully developed human body, and have it innervate the same muscle (for example) that the damaged axon connected to. It's not going to be a trivial challenge. This may have an impact in some traumatic injuries where the bundle can be reconnected before it's scarred shut or resorbed. For chronic conditions, this isn't going to have a direct impact in any near future. An exciting development nonetheless. Will have to follow the primary literature that comes from these authors.
What is a "biometric visual scan of their face"? A photograph?
Every country does that. It's called an ID card. As far as fingerprints, I've had to submit my fingerprints like 10 times for various services, clearances, not to mention immigration documents.
This isn't really news. Even if it's a 3D laser-scan, that's really not different from a photograph nowadays.
As much as it bothers me to have centralized databases of ANYTHING, if there is anything that needs a centralized database, it's identification. I'm a privacy freak and I am not sure that this bothers me, especially in the context of a country that can claim the dubious honor of being the most likely terrorist target in the industrialized world.
Except if it was collected "in good faith"... like searching a car because you think you smelled marijuana. And of course, everything law enforcement does is in "good faith".
I bet you they think that socialized healthcare is FREE too.
No, but it does cost our UK NHS a lot less for drugs because the US consumer subsidizes us by paying way over the odds. Thanks guys!
That's very insightful for an AC post.
Our companies develop all the drugs, with part of the research subsidized by the gov't through taxes, and most of the profits coming from the prices they charge us. UK and EU get to license the drugs, sharing only a small fraction of the costs.
Yay for your healthcare system - it's way superior... except it isn't nearly as much as our newfound bolsheviks are trying to make us believe, and is also unsustainable (beyond stagnation) in a vaccuum.
You should add that the only reason that the drug companies are making this money is because they have their own entitlement--patent law--which is bought and paid for by the taxpayers who suffer for it.
Right. Cause if there was no money to be made in drug development, it would be better for everyone...
Yeah those bastards. getting to work on something as fun as writing games AND expecting to get paid for it too!!!
Seriously.
They made a mistake. I'll give the game designers the benefit of the doubt. They tried a business model, saw that it cannot sustain their company, and are trying to change the strategy, for better or worse.
I bet the same people who want to get all the content for free, are the same people who whine about prescription drug prices. "Why charge me $20 for a pill that costs $0.0002 to make?". They don't care how much money and effort went into making the product, or about all the people who have mortgages to pay and children to feed who worked on it... they just want everything to be delivered to them for FREE, because they're the only people in the world who matter.
I bet you they think that socialized healthcare is FREE too.
Yes, they are that low. We have a post-doc from Australia who says that his stipend as a PhD student was higher than his salary as a post-doc here, and the cost of living is much higher here.
Professors make an average of $100k according to the BLS. That's a lot, in any part of the world.
The conversion rate for a tenured professorship is only a couple % of PhDs. And this is after:
4 years college 6 years PhD 3 years post-doc 1 3 years post-doc 2 6 years associate professor ---- and that's a ROSY picture.
So you're finally making $100k, and you're at least 40 years old (45 more likely)
Congratulations. You've spent your entire youth making $25-45k/year, working 60+ hours/week. You've got no house, no wife, no kids, and the next time NIH cuts its funding you will lose your grant.
As for the job sucking, it's actually amazing... if you're one of the few people who's brilliant enough to make a difference.
I don't know how it is in mathematics, but in biomedical science brilliance has very little to do with it. It's luck, nepotism, and some more luck... intelligence and skill are important, but they won't get you anywhere by themselves.
At that level, you'll get tenure no matter how hard you work, and then you have it easy.
Again, I don't know how it is in mathematics, but I know a number of big names (work for one of them) and NONE of them would say it's easy.
Sorry if this sounds harsh. But academia is one field that does not benefit from having more mediocre people doing make-work. And if you're even concerned about whether tenure will be a problem for you at a good university (such that you're working 60+ hours a week to make it happen for example), you ARE going to be mediocre.
I take it you consider yourself so brilliant that you don't need to work hard. Maybe in math that works, and you can solve some problem nobody else has been able to on your 20th coffee break. Life science research on the other hand is hard work with long hours, requiring meticulous attention to detail.
Math and CS research are progressing as fast or faster than they ever have before. The system is fine, and the majority of great mathematicians / computer scientists are still doing research.
I won't disagree with you because I know next to nil about your field, and I think you would do better if you took a similar approach. Of course, in your brilliance, you probably don't need to.
But aren't you doing something you like doing in that research?
No offense, but I mostly hear that argument when someone tells me that doctors should be happy to help people and shouldn't be making money. It's a red herring.
Nowhere I know...
Living in a major city, by the time I paid $1200 for my studio apartment, and another $200 for misc bills, I'd be left with $400 to spend on food, clothes and entertainment PER MONTH. Try living on that. And then tell me how thrilled anyone should be to be making that.
I make more than $25k a year, of course, but I have to pay for room, board, and my hobby, too).
So do the scientists, and a post-doc making $37k could be 30+ years old.
Hamstringing doctors/nurses pay... not to mention biomedical research because of taxing the biomedical businesses who make their living researching and selling their tech... somehow we're going to tax them to pay for better health care and... erg, don't get me started in that one. Sure, maybe reform is in order, but not haphazard un-thought-out ridiculous reform from a bunch of politicians who mostly inherited fortunes from their families and have barely had to work for anything in their life. No, I'm not just talking about Democrats. That was a bipartisan critique:)
Amen to that. 21% lower Medicare compensation starting January, and falling steadily after that. But malpractice insurance in my state is up about 25% over the past 5 years. Any more and you'd wonder what's the point.
Of course, I've had people tell me flat to my face that they'd love this to happen because "then only people who really want to be doctors would do medicine, cause there'd be no money in it".
A post-doc doing biomedical research (which is the highest-paid field) makes $40k at NYU. This is after spending 4 years in college, and then doing research for 6 years making a $25k/year stipend. With a conversion rate of under 1 percent for faculty positions (which don't pay that much more anyway), why in the world would anyone actually do that to themselves?! You'd have to be REALLY driven to want to work 60+ hour weeks, under the perpetual stress of having your grant pulled, for less than subway ticket clerks make.
Even better, in our new future we'll hamstring doctors and nurses pay, and make sure that nobody gives a damn about that kind of science too.
As for physics and chemistry (and I am not even talking about Mathematics), we've already driven them into the ground. No need to worry any further.
You know, I think that I've learned in the past few weeks that terms have been redefined by the new Bolsheviks.
The "working class" is now the people who don't want to work, the "middle class" are people who can barely make ends meet, and the "rich" is anyone who can still make payments on their house, AND go out to dinner... more simply defined by the jealous rage as "anyone who makes more than me".
How thick do you have to be to think that: a) you should receive "long-term benefits" for being depressed, yet find the strength to go out to the beach and to parties (why can't you find the strength to go to work - the rest of us are depressed and go...)
Not that thick at all - there's a mountain of difference between putting on a brave face for one day and doing it day-in, day-out for weeks/months on end. Being happy at the beach for a day is far easier than being happy in the cubicle for the next year.
(And to those who subscribe to the "if you can do it for one minute, you can do it for ten minutes, then a day, etc." motivational theory - here's your challenge - you can hold your breath for a minute. Why can't you do it for the next year?)
That's not a fair analogy, and if you can't see a government agency denying the same care because of the same reason, than you're either blind, or flat-out refusing to see what doesn't fit your view of the world.
$300/pill for something that costs $0.03 to make and whose research was publicly funded? Not anymore you don't, baby needs a new barrel of pork!
I keep hearing that, except it strictly comes from people who are deeply ignorant about how the industry actually works.
Firstly the "publicly funded" research is basic research, and while it will often generate ideas, it is the pharmaceutical companies that fund development of an idea into a drug from their own pockets.
It costs tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to run clinical trials, and only a FRACTION of drugs that undergo trials ever make it to the market. So while the second pill will cost $0.03 to make, the first cost $300 million.
The vast majority of pharmaceutical development in the world goes on in the US, and one of the reasons is that the pharmaceutical companies are so freaking rich. Yet if you take off the 10% margin that separates the pharmaceutical companies from state-run status quo factories, you're going to wind up with less new drugs, and no recourse when the ones they put out are crap.
Just ask the people in New Orleans whether they liked the government-run services that first protected them against hurricane flooded and then rescued them from the catastrophe. They did a heckuva job...
But ultimately what pisses me off about your reply isn't even the lack of understanding of economics of drug development, but the spirit of entitlement. Nobody says you're entitled to get that pill. Nobody owes it to you. Just like no one owes you any other kind of healthcare. We may want to provide some to you, because it benefits a community in some way... but it doesn't make you entitled to it any more than you're entitled to a new big screen television.
If a company took an idea, paid the inventors, and spent 10 years and 1 billion dollars developing a drug, I'm only happier if their shareholders get rich... because it means more money circulating in the economy, and more new drugs will get developed.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why we have laboratory animals to test our hypotheses on.
There are reasonable limits of skepticism that CAN be satisfied.
You're a confrontational idiot and I have nothing further to say to you. I should've stopped trying when you declared that "in all studies I read correlation = causation".
Correlation is evidence... of correlation. Causation requires prospective analysis to prove. That's why we do experiments. It's that simple. Any time your perform retrospective analysis, you are subject to both confounding variables and sampling bias.
We know smoking causes cancer because we can take a large group, randomize it, THEN track the correlation between the development of cancer versus smoking.
This analysis cannot be done rigorously when you're comparing social groups, because they're divergent by the definition of your sampling criteria.
And that's only the beginning of the mountain of problems with THIS study. Just because you're too thick to understand it, and too eager to deal out accusations, doesn't make you right. It just makes you an asshole.
Wait a minute. Autism is not the result of parenting.
I never claimed it was. But it's always easier to blame someone than to realize that a random recombination of your genetics may have resulted in an autistic child.
Why do you frame this in the need to blame someone, anyway?
That's the way most people see the world. It avoids having to take responsibility.
I've never seen someone use "correlation isn't causation" who understood what that means.
And what makes you so qualified?
In general, these are repeated by others. When found valid, they are then examined for confounds. If you have a correlation and all confounds corrected, you do have a case where correlation = causation. ...In nearly all cases I've seen with a valid study, correlation = causation...
That's so deeply wrong, it's not even funny.
Firstly, AFAIK correlation can NEVER show causation mathematically.
Even in a perfect 2-variable system, with a correlation of 1.0, one cannot assume causality from correlation because the direction of causality cannot be deduced from the correlation.
Secondly, there are countless instances where correlation has no causative relationship at all. For a simple explanation, consider the correlation of a chair and a table being in the same room. Now consider their causative relationship.
It's easy to prove a lack of causation. Proving a causative relationship statistically beyond a reasonable doubt is extremely difficult.
There has never been a study that shows smoking causes cancer. In fact, there have been pretty much no studies done that show anything causes cancer in humans.
It's hard to even consider responding to this nonsense. Of course there hasn't been a study that shows that smoking causes cancer. Except there's been ten million studies that examine individual components of the mechanism of how smoking causes cancer which complement the PROSPECTIVE statistical studies regarding the correlation between smoking and cancer.
We don't know if asbestos causes Mesothelioma. We just have some correlations, and we know those are always wrong and done by those trying to pervert science.
I guess you were with the tobacco CEOs when they got up in front of Congress relatively recently (long after the warnings went on the packs) and stated that they do not believe that smoking is harmful? After all, it's never been proven. Just a couple correlational studies, and we know that if you find a correlation, it means there can't be a causational link. Right?
Now excuse me, I have to go smoke because a cigarette a day keeps the doctor away. Or so the tobacco industry tells us, and no study has ever proven them wrong.
You want to come up with more ad hominems, or are you done? Cause they don't impress me.
Granted.
However, there are plenty of others I could come up with, which are not accounted for.
But none of this would matter, if NYTimes correlation articles weren't used by stupid politicians to try to appease their constituents with policy, or by more nefarious people to sucker others into creating even more rules and regulations.
Without the "writers" reactions - we'd have a society that quietly accepts anything
But that's the problem. We DO have a society that quietly accepts everything... everything that appeals to their basest drives, or reinforces past prejudices, with little to no application of logic or reason.
In this case, as well as when considering Anthropogenic Global Warming, Evolution, or vaccinations, the most paranoid conclusions are the most satisfying, in that they reinforce a foregone conclusion, as well as relieve the bearer of further responsibility.
Glaciers melt = not my fault, it's the sun.
Child has autism = not my fault, it's the vaccines
Child has problems = not my fault, it's the drug conspiracy
Too stupid = fluoride in the water
School shooting = gun manufacturers and video games
Poor = Conspiracy of the rich
These are just a few of a myriad of memes that have been further reinforced by the advent of the Internet and the ensuing ability to find supporters of the most wildly wrong ideas.
And that's scary.
I deeply despise these kinds of articles for the joke they make of statistical correlation.
I think they could all come with a giant "Correlation!=Causation" red box warning.
On one hand, maybe the poor kids are getting over-medicated by a government/drug company/new world order rich person conspiracy.
On the other, maybe it just so happens that more of the poor tend to have psychological problems, which would explain their (and their children's) difficulties in progressing up within the society.
Or the environment endured by the children of the poor would tend to be more damaging than the safe and comfortable environment that the children of the wealthy enjoy.
Without much more data, and without very careful prospective analysis, these "correlation" articles are little more than curiously interesting FUD.
However, since they tend to be part of the outrage machine, I think we ought to hold the writers personally responsible for the reactions that ensue.
Have you been following our recession?
Didn't you know, you can't have a real chemistry set anymore. Only terrorists would want to buy them. Are you trying to raise terrorists?
If you give them electronics, you're obviously trying to raise evil hackers.
If you give them a popular science biology book and some fruit flies to play with, obviously you're equipping them for making biological weapons.
Instead, you should get them a Nintendo and sit them in front of the TV like the good little sheep they should become.
It's one thing to regrow an axon in a petri dish. It's something else to regrow a 1m long axon inside a fully developed human body, and have it innervate the same muscle (for example) that the damaged axon connected to. It's not going to be a trivial challenge. This may have an impact in some traumatic injuries where the bundle can be reconnected before it's scarred shut or resorbed. For chronic conditions, this isn't going to have a direct impact in any near future. An exciting development nonetheless. Will have to follow the primary literature that comes from these authors.
I also like eating, sleeping in a warm bed, driving a decent car, and being able to afford to take a vacation once in a while.
What is a "biometric visual scan of their face"? A photograph?
Every country does that. It's called an ID card. As far as fingerprints, I've had to submit my fingerprints like 10 times for various services, clearances, not to mention immigration documents.
This isn't really news. Even if it's a 3D laser-scan, that's really not different from a photograph nowadays.
As much as it bothers me to have centralized databases of ANYTHING, if there is anything that needs a centralized database, it's identification. I'm a privacy freak and I am not sure that this bothers me, especially in the context of a country that can claim the dubious honor of being the most likely terrorist target in the industrialized world.
Except if it was collected "in good faith"... like searching a car because you think you smelled marijuana. And of course, everything law enforcement does is in "good faith".
Troll my ass you loser.
I bet you they think that socialized healthcare is FREE too.
No, but it does cost our UK NHS a lot less for drugs because the US consumer subsidizes us by paying way over the odds. Thanks guys!
That's very insightful for an AC post.
Our companies develop all the drugs, with part of the research subsidized by the gov't through taxes, and most of the profits coming from the prices they charge us. UK and EU get to license the drugs, sharing only a small fraction of the costs.
Yay for your healthcare system - it's way superior... except it isn't nearly as much as our newfound bolsheviks are trying to make us believe, and is also unsustainable (beyond stagnation) in a vaccuum.
You should add that the only reason that the drug companies are making this money is because they have their own entitlement--patent law--which is bought and paid for by the taxpayers who suffer for it.
Right. Cause if there was no money to be made in drug development, it would be better for everyone...
Yeah those bastards. getting to work on something as fun as writing games AND expecting to get paid for it too!!!
Seriously.
They made a mistake. I'll give the game designers the benefit of the doubt. They tried a business model, saw that it cannot sustain their company, and are trying to change the strategy, for better or worse.
I bet the same people who want to get all the content for free, are the same people who whine about prescription drug prices. "Why charge me $20 for a pill that costs $0.0002 to make?". They don't care how much money and effort went into making the product, or about all the people who have mortgages to pay and children to feed who worked on it... they just want everything to be delivered to them for FREE, because they're the only people in the world who matter.
I bet you they think that socialized healthcare is FREE too.
Yes, they are that low. We have a post-doc from Australia who says that his stipend as a PhD student was higher than his salary as a post-doc here, and the cost of living is much higher here.
Professors make an average of $100k according to the BLS. That's a lot, in any part of the world.
The conversion rate for a tenured professorship is only a couple % of PhDs. And this is after:
4 years college
6 years PhD
3 years post-doc 1
3 years post-doc 2
6 years associate professor
---- and that's a ROSY picture.
So you're finally making $100k, and you're at least 40 years old (45 more likely)
Congratulations. You've spent your entire youth making $25-45k/year, working 60+ hours/week. You've got no house, no wife, no kids, and the next time NIH cuts its funding you will lose your grant.
As for the job sucking, it's actually amazing... if you're one of the few people who's brilliant enough to make a difference.
I don't know how it is in mathematics, but in biomedical science brilliance has very little to do with it. It's luck, nepotism, and some more luck... intelligence and skill are important, but they won't get you anywhere by themselves.
At that level, you'll get tenure no matter how hard you work, and then you have it easy.
Again, I don't know how it is in mathematics, but I know a number of big names (work for one of them) and NONE of them would say it's easy.
Sorry if this sounds harsh. But academia is one field that does not benefit from having more mediocre people doing make-work. And if you're even concerned about whether tenure will be a problem for you at a good university (such that you're working 60+ hours a week to make it happen for example), you ARE going to be mediocre.
I take it you consider yourself so brilliant that you don't need to work hard. Maybe in math that works, and you can solve some problem nobody else has been able to on your 20th coffee break. Life science research on the other hand is hard work with long hours, requiring meticulous attention to detail.
Math and CS research are progressing as fast or faster than they ever have before. The system is fine, and the majority of great mathematicians / computer scientists are still doing research.
I won't disagree with you because I know next to nil about your field, and I think you would do better if you took a similar approach. Of course, in your brilliance, you probably don't need to.
But aren't you doing something you like doing in that research?
No offense, but I mostly hear that argument when someone tells me that doctors should be happy to help people and shouldn't be making money. It's a red herring.
Nowhere I know...
Living in a major city, by the time I paid $1200 for my studio apartment, and another $200 for misc bills, I'd be left with $400 to spend on food, clothes and entertainment PER MONTH. Try living on that. And then tell me how thrilled anyone should be to be making that.
I make more than $25k a year, of course, but I have to pay for room, board, and my hobby, too).
So do the scientists, and a post-doc making $37k could be 30+ years old.
Hamstringing doctors/nurses pay... not to mention biomedical research because of taxing the biomedical businesses who make their living researching and selling their tech ... somehow we're going to tax them to pay for better health care and ... erg, don't get me started in that one. Sure, maybe reform is in order, but not haphazard un-thought-out ridiculous reform from a bunch of politicians who mostly inherited fortunes from their families and have barely had to work for anything in their life. No, I'm not just talking about Democrats. That was a bipartisan critique :)
Amen to that. 21% lower Medicare compensation starting January, and falling steadily after that. But malpractice insurance in my state is up about 25% over the past 5 years. Any more and you'd wonder what's the point.
Of course, I've had people tell me flat to my face that they'd love this to happen because "then only people who really want to be doctors would do medicine, cause there'd be no money in it".
Not going to happen.
A post-doc doing biomedical research (which is the highest-paid field) makes $40k at NYU. This is after spending 4 years in college, and then doing research for 6 years making a $25k/year stipend. With a conversion rate of under 1 percent for faculty positions (which don't pay that much more anyway), why in the world would anyone actually do that to themselves?! You'd have to be REALLY driven to want to work 60+ hour weeks, under the perpetual stress of having your grant pulled, for less than subway ticket clerks make.
Even better, in our new future we'll hamstring doctors and nurses pay, and make sure that nobody gives a damn about that kind of science too.
As for physics and chemistry (and I am not even talking about Mathematics), we've already driven them into the ground. No need to worry any further.
Only the wealthy can "vote with their dollar.
You know, I think that I've learned in the past few weeks that terms have been redefined by the new Bolsheviks.
The "working class" is now the people who don't want to work, the "middle class" are people who can barely make ends meet, and the "rich" is anyone who can still make payments on their house, AND go out to dinner... more simply defined by the jealous rage as "anyone who makes more than me".
How thick do you have to be to think that:
a) you should receive "long-term benefits" for being depressed, yet find the strength to go out to the beach and to parties (why can't you find the strength to go to work - the rest of us are depressed and go...)
Not that thick at all - there's a mountain of difference between putting on a brave face for one day and doing it day-in, day-out for weeks/months on end. Being happy at the beach for a day is far easier than being happy in the cubicle for the next year.
(And to those who subscribe to the "if you can do it for one minute, you can do it for ten minutes, then a day, etc." motivational theory - here's your challenge - you can hold your breath for a minute. Why can't you do it for the next year?)
That's not a fair analogy, and if you can't see a government agency denying the same care because of the same reason, than you're either blind, or flat-out refusing to see what doesn't fit your view of the world.
$300/pill for something that costs $0.03 to make and whose research was publicly funded? Not anymore you don't, baby needs a new barrel of pork!
I keep hearing that, except it strictly comes from people who are deeply ignorant about how the industry actually works.
Firstly the "publicly funded" research is basic research, and while it will often generate ideas, it is the pharmaceutical companies that fund development of an idea into a drug from their own pockets.
It costs tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to run clinical trials, and only a FRACTION of drugs that undergo trials ever make it to the market. So while the second pill will cost $0.03 to make, the first cost $300 million.
The vast majority of pharmaceutical development in the world goes on in the US, and one of the reasons is that the pharmaceutical companies are so freaking rich. Yet if you take off the 10% margin that separates the pharmaceutical companies from state-run status quo factories, you're going to wind up with less new drugs, and no recourse when the ones they put out are crap.
Just ask the people in New Orleans whether they liked the government-run services that first protected them against hurricane flooded and then rescued them from the catastrophe. They did a heckuva job...
But ultimately what pisses me off about your reply isn't even the lack of understanding of economics of drug development, but the spirit of entitlement. Nobody says you're entitled to get that pill. Nobody owes it to you. Just like no one owes you any other kind of healthcare. We may want to provide some to you, because it benefits a community in some way... but it doesn't make you entitled to it any more than you're entitled to a new big screen television.
If a company took an idea, paid the inventors, and spent 10 years and 1 billion dollars developing a drug, I'm only happier if their shareholders get rich... because it means more money circulating in the economy, and more new drugs will get developed.